Writing a Good Poem — and What to Avoid

What a good poem actually does

A good poem does not tell you what to feel; it makes you feel it by showing you something exactly. It works by concentration — every word carries weight, nothing is filler — and by discovery: it arrives somewhere the writer did not fully know at the start. Robert Frost's test still holds: no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Practically, a strong contemporary poem tends to:

Begin in the concrete — a specific image, moment, or object rather than an abstraction.
Trust the reader — it withholds explanation and lets meaning accumulate.
Turn — it changes direction, deepens, or complicates itself at least once.
Sound intentional — its music and line breaks feel chosen, not accidental.
End with inevitability and surprise — a close that feels both unexpected and, in retrospect, the only possible one.

On the image — the poem's fundamental unit

The image is the atom of poetry. Ezra Pound defined it as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" — a concrete, sensory thing that carries feeling and thought without stating them. When Williams gives us a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater, he gives us no adjectives of emotion, yet the poem is charged with attention and dependence.

Beginners announce feelings: I was overwhelmed with grief. Poets build images that are the feeling:

Stated feeling

I was so sad after she died, the emptiness was unbearable and everything felt meaningless.

Image that carries feeling

Her coffee cup is still on the windowsill, the ring of it dried to a pale brown halo I keep not washing off.

Rules for the image: make it concrete (nameable, physical), specific (a "Gravenstein apple," not "fruit"), and sensory (available to sight, sound, touch, taste, smell). Let it do the emotional work so you do not have to name the emotion at all. This single discipline separates published poems from unpublished ones more than any other.

On the line — where poetry becomes poetry

The line is what makes a poem a poem rather than a paragraph. Where you break a line is a decision as meaningful as any word choice. The line break controls pace, emphasis, breath, and surprise. Two forces run through every free-verse poem: the sentence (grammar, which wants to flow) and the line (which wants to pause). Great poets play them against each other.

Consider the difference a break makes:

She said she was leaving in the morning. Enjambed — "leaving" hangs alone, a half-second of dread before "in the morning" resolves it.

She said she was leaving in the morning. End-stopped — flat, informational, the tension gone.

Working Principles of the Line

End-stopped lines (finishing on punctuation) create rest, weight, and closure.
Enjambed lines (running past the break with no pause) create momentum, suspense, and double meaning — the last word of a line means one thing until the next line changes it.
End words carry power. The word at the end of a line gets emphasis. Put your strongest, most surprising words there; avoid ending on weak words like "the," "of," or "and" unless for deliberate effect.
Line length sets the poem's breathing. Short lines feel urgent and fragmentary; long lines feel discursive and calm.
The stanza is the line's larger cousin — a unit of white space that paces the poem like a paragraph.

What to avoid — the common failures

Editors reject most submissions for a small, repeating set of reasons. Learn them and you clear the first bar before your poem is even read for its virtues.

Avoid these

Abstraction over image. Naming feelings (love, pain, joy) instead of building the concrete things that produce them.
Cliché. "Heart of gold," "tears like rain," "time heals." If you have heard the phrase before, cut it.
Sentimentality. Emotion in excess of the occasion, feeling asserted rather than earned.
Explaining the poem. Telling the reader what it means, usually in a final "moral" line. Trust the images and stop sooner.
Adjective and adverb pile-up. Weak nouns and verbs propped up by modifiers. Prefer the exact noun and the strong verb.
Forced or filler rhyme. Bending syntax or meaning to hit a rhyme; padding a line to keep meter.
The predictable ending. A close the reader saw coming from the first stanza.
Inconsistent line-breaking. Breaks that seem random, with no relationship to sense, sound, or emphasis.

Do these instead

Show through the senses. Convert every abstraction into a thing you can see or hear.
Make it strange. Find the fresh comparison, the unexpected verb, the detail no one else would notice.
Cut the last line. Then see if the poem is stronger ending one line earlier. It often is.
Read aloud. Your ear catches padding, cliché, and dead rhythm faster than your eye.
Choose the load-bearing word. One precise noun beats three vague ones.
Break lines on purpose. Ask of every break: what does this earn?
Surprise yourself. If the ending was obvious to you, revise until it isn't.

How to revise toward the finished poem

First drafts are for discovery; revision is where the poem is actually written. A working sequence:

Set it aside. Let a draft cool for days so you can read it as a stranger would.
Cut ruthlessly. Delete the first stanza (poems often begin one stanza late) and the last line (poems often end one line late). Test both.
Hunt abstractions and clichés. Replace each with a concrete image or a fresher phrase.
Re-break the lines. Try the poem in longer lines, then shorter, then in couplets. Let the shape argue for itself.
Read it aloud, then read it to someone. Note every place your voice hesitates; those are the places to fix.
Title last. A good title adds a layer rather than repeating the poem. Avoid "Untitled."

James's Working Advice

Write from the concrete outward. Begin with a real object, place, or moment. Let meaning grow from it; do not start with the meaning.
Read ten poems for every one you write. Your reading is your reservoir. Keep it full.
Draft fast, revise slow. Get the raw material down without judgment, then bring all your care to the revision.
Trust the reader's intelligence. Say less. The white space around a poem is part of the poem.
Earn every abstraction. If you must use a large word like grief or joy, surround it with enough concrete life that it lands.
Learn one received form. Even if you write free verse, write a real sonnet and a real ghazal once. Constraint teaches compression.
Finish poems. A finished small poem teaches more than a hundred abandoned starts.
Keep the failures. Today's dead poem is tomorrow's stolen line.

A poem is not a message wrapped in pretty words. It is an experience made of images and lines — an object that means by being, not by explaining.

Next — Contemporary Techniques →

Craft principles synthesized from standard teaching sources including Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook; Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem; and Ezra Pound's Imagist tenets, alongside James F. Mulhern's own instruction. Poem specimens are original examples written for this guide.